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January 16, 2008

Google Developing OS X Version Of Picasa

Picasa_logo…and the best part is that it will be available this year. Not having Picasa is one of my last regrets about switching from Windows to a Mac over the past year (the other is BlogJet… Dmitry, please!).

iPhoto has some fantastic innovations, such as the “Event” concept, yet Picasa is the superior application.

Picasa is faster and had far better integration with photo upload sites, particularly shutterfly and snapfish.

My favorite line from the original link is this:

I asked if Picasa for Mac was coming, and as luck would have it I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year.

My only hesitation will be whether Picasa will force me to lose much of the benefit I see in using iPhoto, mainly it’s integration with the rest of the Mac (screensavers, iMovie ‘08, iPod photo sync, etc.) Losing all of that will make me think twice about re-embracing Picasa on OS X.

Thanks John!

October 9, 2007

iPhoto Library Screwed

I basically screwed up my iPhoto library and spent the past two nights rebuilding it.

The main reason for the catastrophic failure was the inconsistent way I was managing the photos. I could not make up my mind between allowing iPhoto to copy photos into it’s photo package or whether it should simply “refer” to photos found in my library. So, I had photos in both places.

For a while, this worked fine. However, I began to worry about duplicates so I went on a duplicate file witch hunt and found that I had loads of duplicate files haunting my cramped 500GB drive.

Yes, I’m suffering.

However, most duplicate file finders are essentially brain dead. In my head, finding and effectively removing hundreds or thousands of duplicates in tens of thousands of files is impossible with any of the tools I’ve found. The reason for this is because tools are only good enough to list the duplicates side by side, but unable to give you automation commands such as allowing you to eliminate all duplicates found in a particular directory.

For instance, you might get a duplicate report like so:

iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05678.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05678.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05679.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05679.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05680.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05680.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05681.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05681.jpg

In this situation, “Marco’s 4th Birthday 2” is the folder that has the duplicate files. Imagine I had 90 files in this directory and I found duplicates in 300 similar folders.

Happy hunting.

First, the tools I’ve found generally only allow you to delete 1 duplicate record at a time. I could delete the duplicate directory but it might just have some files that are unique. Plus, I generally can’t delete the directory right form the GUI, I have to go back to Finder, navigate there, delete it, and re-do my duplicate file search to trim down the list.

Repeat until done.

Second, if I could select one duplicate and simply tell the tool “Delete all duplicates in the parent directory” we’d be done. Extra credit for nixing the directory if all files wind up being nuked.

Oh, but I digress.

I stupidly tried to consolidate and settle on storing all photos within iPhoto. Hoping that iPhoto would detect the dupes. It seemed to have this functionality, but it simply did not work.

family photo (Sample duplicate photo dialog)

I somehow wound up in a situation where half of my files were symbolic links and none of them pointed to a valid location. So… I essentially failed at this task.

I then tried to hold down Ctrl+Command or perhaps Option+Command when iPhoto started in an effort to correct this. Holding down these keys upon startup invokes an undocumented feature that screwed up my library even more.

Yay Apple!

In the end, I decided to start over. I cracked open the iPhoto Library file (by Option+Click on he iPhoto Library file) and selected “Show Package Contents”.

I then copied the “Originals” directory to my desktop and deleted the iPhoto library. Yes, I lost any “modifications” that I made to the photos (such as brightness/contrast adjustments or cropping) but I could not give a rat’s ass at this point.

So, I fired up iPhoto again. It shook it’s head in surprise and wondered where the library file went. I instructed it to create a new empty library and off I went into a 2-hour import. 20 minutes of event auto-splitting later and I was back in business.

October 6, 2007

Gmail Rocks

So, tonight I set my dad up with gmail. He has been moving around a bit and moving ISP’s nearly as often. The changes to his e-mail clients were constantly causing him to reconfigure them and each time it seemed like such a struggle. Of course, I’m the tech guy who has to assist.

I approached him about using gmail about two years ago, but my brother was set against it claiming that gmail would not yield the experience he was used to.

This time around I just did it, and did it in a big way. I didn’t just set him up with just any o ld gmail account, I decided to change the entire domain name to direct e-mails to gmail. This is what Google calls “Google Apps for XYZ Domain”. The configuration is pretty intense and not something the average user can set up. However, once it’s set up you essentially have the following.

Google gets all mail directed to your domain. You get to keep your domain and you get to keep your existing e-mail address.

You get a control panel where you can create a homepage, manage google chat, create web pages, manage e-mail accounts, create online calendars, and have access to Google Docs (docs, spreadsheets and now presentations).

My Dad mentioned on numerous occasions that he loves some of the glitzy features of his “Incredimail” e-mail client and I knew that although gmail was the ultimate in reliability and usability, he might not even see that if he could not send his emoticons.

So, I did three things to make him feel more comfortable.

First, I enabled POP access so he can have his cake and eat it to. Doing this assumed that using gmail’s POP and SMTP server would be “easier” to configure than the trouble I had with my domain hoster. Time will tell.

Second, I populated his contact list with all of his family members and added pictures so he’d see as much visual jazz as I could possibly muster.

Third, I created this friendly ad of his grandson saying, “Gmail Rocks!”

Gmail Rocks!

September 2, 2007

Submitting to all things Mac

I’m a recent switcher to the Mac. My first computer was a TI 994a, then I moved onto a custom-built IBM XT (clone) running PC-DOS, then MS DOS, then onto IBM AT and IBM 386 computers running Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 (3.11, hah!), and eventually I was a very early adopter of Windows NT, then to Windows NT 4 (SP3!), Windows 2000, Windows XP and most recently Windows Vista x64 at work.

I’ve made a living on the Windows platform but I eventually saw that there was no need for this at home. As I see my kids growing more comfortable with computer technology, I wanted them to grow into a platform that made things easy and allowed them to be successful at anything they wanted to accomplish. In the end, Windows and Dell computers simply did not fit he bill.

Consider my kids’ iMacs. There is one cable running from the machine to the wall, a power cable. If you are a PC user, recall the mess behind your desk and consider if it’s all really necessary. On the iMac, the display is built-in and the mouse and keyboard are wireless. The iMac even comes with a remote, making it a comfortable DVD and music player they can manipulate via FrontRow as they recline on their chairs.

But I digress.

Over the past 14 months, I’ve replaced each and every machine in my home with a Mac. Why did I do this? It’s hard to say. Lots of reasons. Let me try to explain.

Over the past few years, my appreciation for Apple and the way the engineer their products has been steadily increasing. It was an iPod at first, then iTunes, then the experience of being in the Apple store. Apple’s marketing team blitzed my mind brilliantly. They knew me, a PC user, and slowly worked their way into my world by bringing key products to Windows.

As I saw the way they put software together and how well they engineered their physical hardware, I thought to myself there must be a better way than Dell, Windows, anti-virus, anti-spam, spyware, apps that barely work together and a tangled mess of wires behind my desk.

Then, Apple switched processors from the PowerPC to Intel. All the while, virtualization software was growing exponentially in popularity and performance was becoming almost native. Then Apple released Boot Camp, allowing Windows XP and Vista to run natively on any Intel-based Mac. It was all just becoming obvious. I could have my cake and eat it on flaming-fast, beautiful, hardware.

I started with a laptop, a MacBook, and gently eased myself into the Mac world. I listened to Mac Podcasts, tried out Mac software, and tried to simulate my regular workflows using Mac software.

There were some gems on the PC that I would miss very badly if I switched. Visual Studio, C++, and .NET are where all of my experience lay. Without those, I’m somewhat powerless to make the computer do more than what I can purchase or download. Google’s Picasa is a brilliant program and one that I still miss. But that’s where virtualization kicks in. Using Parallels or VMWare Fusion, I can run all of this side-by-side with my Mac software. Ultimately, though, if the Mac was going to be a successful replacement for my PC, I had to have certain apps run natively.

On the PC, I spent most of my time in these apps :

I spend my time making maps for D&D (some here), managing my home photos (I have, like 22,000 digital photos), doing simple video editing (again, like 100+ hours of DV and HDV video), programming, and of course web browsing and blogging.

I chugged along on my MacBook… experimenting, downloading, and trying out. I did this for months and months. I was only “playing” with iPhoto, though, which I felt was never nearly as good as Picasa. I used the MacBook on the train for browsing the web (thanks to my phone’s bluetooth Internet sharing) and reading PDF’s. I subscribed to Apple Downloads and found some awesome gems:

  • TextMate - An awesome text editor. I use it for blogging… like right now
  • Parallels and later VMWare Fusion
  • iStumbler
  • MacDrive - Which helps me manage the transition from PC to Mac by allowing my PC to see my Mac-formatted external drive
  • Flip4Mac - Which allows me to play Windows Media video on the Mac within QuickTime
  • QuickTime - I think that a lot of people don’t realize how amazing QuickTime Pro is. At $29, it’s a serious must-have application if you do anything with Video
  • Photo2Movie - An excellent program that turns photos into digital video slideshows… with some amazing Ken Burns effects
  • Jungle Disk - How to automatically save and backup gigabytes of data on Amazon S3’s website for pennies a month. Well, maybe a few dollars… but not a lot of them.
  • Hardware Monitor - Similar programs for the PC are just crap and they have to deal with gazillions of motherboard manufacturers. This program monitors everything in a clean and convenient interface
  • Adium - For all your IM needs in a single window
  • Quicksilver - The only program launcher you’ll ever need… for keyboard junkies
  • TeamSpeex - A TeamSpeak client for the Mac
  • ChronoSync - A wondrous file synchronization program
  • Quadrium - Kind of like a fractal, image-processing, Yahoo! Pipes extravaganza.

For the latest mac software links, at least the ones that I find interesting, check out my del.icio.us links:

http://del.icio.us/NickCody/software%2BMac or subscribe

And, of course, the Mac has some built-in wonders:

  • Grapher - An amazing graphing and plotting package which can animate charts and formula at the touch of a button Polar
  • Disk Utility - Norton Ghost? Who needs it. The Mac has this functionality built right in.

Now, yes, Windows has tons of software. Tons more than the Mac. I have found, though, that Mac Software works better together. Whether it’s support for Automator, or for special locations like iTunes and iPhoto stores, applications tend to make easy tasks easy and hard things possible. I borrowed the analogy from my friend the .NET Addict, who describes developing Cocoa applications that way.

For instance, when I want to insert an audio clip as background music for a slideshow, iPhoto shows me my iTunes library within the insert-audio dialog box and supplies a convenient instant-search box so I can quickly locate the tune that I’m looking for, right within iPhoto. 3rd party apps are amazingly consistent in this way, more so than I have experienced with Windows apps.

Then, it was time to take things up a notch and, for Christmas, I splurged and got my kids a pair of iMacs. I blogged about that experience back in December of last year.

I have never regretted that purchase. My kids were able to do more with the Mac with the same computer skills they had 5 minutes earlier, as they shared a Dell PC. The kids just ‘got’ the software and were able to do magic with it.

I even found an awesome typing-tutor program for the Mac, called TypingTrainer4Mac. My kids record their speed every day and have been steadily becoming expert touch-typists.

Then, about a month ago I decided to take the final plunge. After nearly a year of research, I had decided that the Mac was my platform.

I went and purchased a Mac Pro to finish the job I had started last summer. In addition to the Mac Pro, I went and replaced by old version of Adobe Creative Suite 1 with a brand-new version of Creative Suite 3 Design Premium for the Mac. This suite was perhaps my most important software purchase to date and was the final nail on the coffin.

But Apple didn’t stop there. Just a few weeks ago they released iLife ‘08, an amazing update to an already amazing built-in package. iLife ‘08 finally made me forget about Picasa (well, almost… Picasa is tons faster even with my 8-core Mac Pro). With the introduction of the ‘Event’ concept and tighter integration with their .mac service, I was sold on the Mac photo management workflow. iMovie ‘08 also leveraged the ‘Event’ concept and for the first time, I find myself actually with a viable platform to bring in my 100 hours of DV and HDV video so it’s all available for editing and DVD authoring.

But Apple didn’t stop there. They came out with an update to iWork which included a Spreadsheet package and some amazing usability enhancements for Pages, their word processor. Pages can now handle all editing tasks from simple word-processing to more advanced page layout (via two fully-separate modes of operation). Pages can even open the brand-new Office 2007 file format and has naive support for drop-shadows, reflections, and many of the native layout capabilities that I love about Office 2007 (I use it at work and Office 2007 rocks pretty hard).

The beauty of the “Apple Way” is that they don’t ever seem to stop. I know I sound like a drooling fanboy here, but really that’s what this post is about so I’m going with it since I’m sure to be complaining about this and that in the coming months as I go through withdrawal. This post is mainly about recognizing a successful software company who is simply hitting all the marks that I needed someone to hit in order to win me over. Unlike Microsoft, Apple updates their OS regularly and each revision is a major leap forward. Vista is nice, but it was too-huge an update and we waited way too long for it. It will take years for ISV’s to adapt their software to work the way Microsoft would have Vista apps work, if ever.

I have also noticed the obvious advantage that Apple has in designing the hardware along with the Software. Functionality like sleeping a notebook are so much smoother on the Mac than they are on the PC. You just can’t compare the experience. There are some amazing synergies that you get when you control both the hardware and the software. I’m sure an Apple TV is in my future as well since it works so naturally with my entire Photo, Video, and Music collection. The iPod itself epitomizes this integration and is perhaps the most popular example of how true and beautiful integration can be a reality.

All in all, I’m happy and excited about the possibilities in this new era for me.

June 6, 2007

Bye, bye, Bloglines

Rip_bloglines

Finally, after like 3 or so years, I am closing the doors on Bloglines. Bloglines has been my RSS Aggregator of choice since I started using RSS aggregators.

Like a lot of people, I started out with some of the offline ones like RSS Bandit and NewsGator. However, I found that I wasn’t always using my laptop (as a single store for offline items) nor was I always reading entries at work or at home. It became clear very quickly that an online aggregator like Bloglines was the solution for me.

I wrote about Bloglines here at Primordial Ooze many times. I wrote an early Bloglines RSS extractor in Python which helped me manage my iPodder subscriptions back in the very early days of Podcasting.

When I got a mobile device with broadband Internet access, I discovered Bloglines’ mobile version which was simple and perfect for my commute.

Then, the trouble began. Bloglines development was progressing slower than molasses. At some point during all of this, Google Reader came out. I could have moved over at that point but the Google mobile reader simply wasn’t ready.

Still, Google kept innovating and new features were being added on a regular basis. Contrast this to the sickly pace I was experiencing over at Bloglinesland. Only in the past 12 months has Bloglines slowly added features:

  • A better mass-subscription editing mode
  • More AJAXy goodness so I don’t have to refresh so much
  • Um…

That’s not a very long list.

Then, all of a sudden, Google Reader announced that they will support Google’s new Google Gears offline plugin to Firefox.

I was interested so I export my subscriptions from Bloglines, imported them into Reader, checked out the mobile version and was simply amazed at the improvements made since I last looked.

  • Far more AJAX than Bloglines could ever have, resulting in a cleaner less web-like experience
  • Offline capabilities (though not too important to me)
  • Excellent tagging and searching of feeds
  • Reading trend analysis to help be continually cull and grow my subscription list to suit my changing reading habits
  • The “Next” bookmarklet is fantastic for all of those feeds with annoying partial entries. It brings  up the next unread item, except the actual page referenced i n the RSS and not the content of the RSS! This will change the way I read RSS.
  • And a lot more.

If you are a Bloglines user, you should consider Google Reader. IMHO, it’s better, more innovative, tons more features, and maintained with a lot more dedication which will only serve to increase its lead.

R.I.P. Bloglines

April 10, 2007

Deleting files with special names under Linux

In the spirit of this blog being a way for me to remember how to do things, I present a method to delete filenames under Linux that confuse the command-line utilities.

I had a script which, as a result of a syntax error, produced a file called:

—exclude-from=exclusions

Trying to remove this file by simply deleting it yielded this error:

rm: unrecognized option --exclude-from=exclusions' Tryrm —help’ for more information.

So, Googling found this link:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/delete-remove-files-with-inode-number.html

The method described there is simple. Find the file’s internal i-node number and use the find’s ability to execute any command on results it’s finds to invoke rm on the results.

Two simple commands fixed by file:

obraxus:~/backup> ls -il
total 2932488
1746866 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206   48218112 Apr 10 19:39 --exclude-from=exclusions
1746694 -rwxr-xr-x  1 ncodigno pg51206        328 Apr 10 19:41 backup_primordia.csh
1746494 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206        167 Apr 14  2006 crontab_file
1746547 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206   35799040 Jan 28 03:24 d21_200701.tar.gz
1746442 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206         25 Jan 28 03:55 exclusions
3216545 -rwxr-xr-x  1 ncodigno pg51206       2728 Apr 15  2006 moin_config.py
3216543 -rwxr-xr-x  1 ncodigno pg51206       2688 Apr 15  2006 moin_config2.py
1746546 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206 2915876864 Jan 28 03:23 primordia_200701.tar.gz

Then issue this command:

find . -inum 1746866 -exec rm -i {} \;

QED.

February 26, 2007

Jungle Disk and Amazon S3

So, I’m using a product called Jungle Disk which is a front-end interface to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

Jungle Disk really became useful to me when they implemented automatic backup to the S3 service. Currently, I save a bunch of files which aren’t huge in size, but would be a pain in the next to lose. Using the Jungle Disk backup feature, I save almost 5GB of files to S3. The backups happen continuously, every 5 minutes to 1 hour depending on which machine we’re talking about.

How much does this cost me per month? About $1.53! Consider these advantages:

  • Your files are safely stored on a server somewhere in Amazon’s data centers, far from your home. A fire, for instance, would not threaten the data you have backed up.
  • You can access the files from anywhere, assuming you can remember the massively complex keys that amazon supplies you with to protect your files. Man, I miss TrueCrypt while on my Mac.
  • Did I mention the ridiculously trivial cost for this?

Jungle Disk stores the backups in folders based on your computer name. In my case, my root folder is accessed via a network share in OS X. On Windows, it looks like WebDAV is used and the S3 home folder is shown in “My Network Places.”

On my Mac, for example, I can see all of the files backed up by my PC and vice versa. File copies are pretty fast, too, though it’s hard to tell since your home or work network connection plays a large part in that.

Amazon S3 can also encrypt your files, but I don’t enable that. I figure that I’m going to encrypt anything really sensitive locally myself with my own software. So, if some Amazon system administrator wants to browse my files, they could, but the files I encrypt myself should be safe.

If you were looking into a different way to backup your personal files, I definitely think you should check out S3 and JungleDisk.

January 21, 2007

WinZIP and StuffIt Expander compatibilities

I recently became a fan of some of the new compression algorithms that WinZIP is supporting. The one that is working best for me is PPMd. I was able to get about 40% compression on my camera RAW files, about 100GB and reduce that to about 60GB.  This was a huge savings and allowed me to avoid a hard drive upgrade possibly for six more months.

I wanted to send a large PDF to friends and I know some of them use a Mac, so I was curious to see if StuffIt expander supported this compression algorithm. As it turns out, 10.x does not, but 11.02 does.

It’s funny, I’ve been seeing a reminder lately on my MacBook asking me to upgrade to 11.02 and I kept hitting, no, no, no. Then, when I tried to unpack my ZIP file that uses PPMd compression and saw how 10.x failed, I immedately upgraded and was pleasantly surprised to see the zip file unpack successfully.

 

January 9, 2007

Workflow problems with iPhoto

I was at my Grandmother's house last week and I noticed a photo album on her coffee table. It looked a lot like this (with similar pictures of snowboarders):

iPhoto Album

Mac users will recognize this as an iPhoto “Book”. I definitely liked the dense picture-rich layout of the book. As I flipped through the book, I was more and more impressed. It wasn't until I got to the end of the album that I learned how it was made. Turning to the last page revealed the answer... “Made with a Mac” appeared prominently on inside back cover.

When I went home that night I fired up my MacBook and started playing with iPhoto and the photobooks in an effort to create my own master “2006: A Year in Photos” for my family.

Until now, I had been making photo albums online with services like snapfish and shutterfly. I think we've gotten good results with these services in the past, but I simply liked Grandma's book better.

The first step was to get my photos off my Windows machine and onto my Mac. My Windows machine is still my primary workplace for photo editing and management since I own Adobe Photoshop CS on that platform. When Creative Suite CS3 comes out later this year, I will switch to the Mac full-time. Until then, I had to get all of my 2006 photos onto my laptop.

To do that, I spent the better part of my first weekend on the project converting my camera RAW files to full-size JPEG files. I had 5 megapixel images already on my Windows machine since my camera spits those out in addition to the RAW files. However, I wanted the full 10.3 megapixel JPEG's available to make sure all of my images would have at least 300dpi of resolution at 8.5“ x 11” (the size of the book I wanted to create). My camera spits out 3888 horizontal pixels so this yields 353dpi at 11“ which is more than sufficient to yield crisp, clear photos. Well, so long as my photos are crisp and clear to begin with!

This conversion yielded about 4300 photos. I then brought them into iPhoto and was faced with finding a strategy to rate them. The approach I used was going to be multi-pass. On the first pass, I rated any photo I thought had a chance of making the iPhoto book with 3 stars (of 5). I did this by pressing the Apple+3 key combo. This yes/no approach took hours to complete and I found that the train was a great place to do it. Thank Apple for providing the Apple+3 combo, a feature that Picasa on the PC lacks unless I'm mistaken.

iPhoto has a feature called ”Autoflow“ which makes it relatively easy to cram all of your photos into the book with a single click. However, as I found out, the process stops abruptly when you exceed 100 pages. This alert and my subsequent struggles are essentially the reason for this post.

Tagging photos as 3 stars still yielded over 500 photos and this was too many to cram into a photo book by simply pressing Autoflow. Autoflow was just not smart enough. To avoid a fist-fight with the ”iPhoto Book's are limited to 100 pages“ alert, I decided to continue the rating process so I could get the final image count down.

To do this, I created a smart album which only contained images with a rating of 3 stars or more. This approach allowed me to ”forget about“ photos I had discarded early. I then picked the better ones and rated them with 4 stars. I was liberal in rating images as 4 stars since I realized at this point that the album would likely only contain images with ratings of 4 and 5 stars.

My image count got down to about 300 photos. I then further refined my count by creating a 4-star smart album and marking the photos that I absolutely had to have in the book with 5 stars. My final smart album, 5 stars, 280 photos, hours of agonizing work.

Still, Autoflow complained. Arg!

To understand my problems with Autoflow, I need to explain how photos are laid out in iPhoto books. When you create a new page in an iPhoto book, it can have a wide range of layouts. Layouts can contain a single image, attractive layouts of 3-4 photos, or a big grid of 16 photos. When you choose Autoflow” it seems to choose a simple mix of 2, 3, and 4 photo layouts. Over the course of 100 pages, this yields an average capacity of about 300 photos.

It would be very simply for the Autoflow feature to realize you have more photos than will fit with this scheme and adjust the page layouts to compensate. At 16 photos per page, Autoflow could support over 1600 images per book! Of course, uploading 1600 photos would be a huge task and I fear it may break in the middle and I have no idea what might happen to the workflow if that were to happen.

In addition, iPhoto has no way to select a couple of 2-page layouts, move them to a layout that can support more photos and “pull” photos back from the rest of the book to back-autoflow the book to yield more empty pages at the back of the book to be auto-filled with the remaining photos.

Autoflow works sequentially, so when it stops at 10 pages the remaining images are at the end of your image pool.

Part of my problem is that I require the photos to appear in order. This was a “2006” book, after all. Other users might not care to have their photos in any particular order and iPhoto's ability to change the layout to a higher count and simply dump some of your “last photos” in the middle of your book won't be a problem.

I'm finishing this post on the train. I was so busy at work today I missed all of the MacWorld keynote goodness I was hoping to catch. I'm hoping when I get home and watch it online that Apple will reveal a new version of iLife, with a new version of iPhoto, with a new version of Autoflow.

October 17, 2006

Google Reader Roundup

Aaron B. Hockley in his Another Blogger blog, has a pretty nice round-up of what bloggers think about the new Google Reader.

We’ve probably all read what the big boys (Scoble, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, etc) have said about the new Google Reader, but here’s a compilation of what some “ordinary” bloggers have to say (click for the full post)

Highlights (for me) include:

  • No search funtion in GOOGLE reader? WTF?

:-)

October 10, 2006

Bloglines vs. Google Reader

Bloglines_vs_google_reader

I’ll start off this comparison with a disclaimer. The review I present here is not as comprehensive as you’d get if you were reading a real publication. Below is an account of the review I did for myself as I debated on which tool I wanted to use moving forward. Perhaps the insight will be useful to you, perhaps not. There you have it.

I have been a loyal user of Bloglines for a long, long time. I was sold on the concept of a server-based aggregator the moment I was aware that the tools were out there. No tool could ever really compare to Bloglines. I always admired it’s simplicity and usefulness. Now there is another compelling choice out there and I’m once again tempted to switch.

As I used Bloglines, I saw that the feature set started to become rather stale after a while. So, I started to play with some of the other tools out there. To my dismay, tools like Rojo, Netvibes, Google Reader never seemed impressive enough to switch. Google reader, for instance, was terribly slow in it’s initial version. So, I was stuck with Bloglines. It worked, so I dismissed the lack of development and simply enjoyed the tool that still worked for me.

Then a few things happened. First, Bloglines started to improve. New features started popping up all of a sudden and my aggregated life started getting better. Then, a new world was open to me when Bloglines introduced their mobile version. My PDA is Internet-enabled and I now had the ability to read feeds during my 50–minute commute.

Now, Google Reader is back and with a vengeance. The new version is a completely new experience and boats dozens of features and speed improvements to boot. The dark side pulls at me. My situation is worsened when I find that Google Reader has a feature that I have been dying for Bloglines to add: mark individual items as read as you read them. There is AJAX magic going on here, but it works.

Google Reader has everything I need, yay! I can now use Google for everything!

Wait! Stop! Hold on a minute? What about their mobile version?

In a word, is sucks some serious ass! It’s simply unusable. The m ain reason is because the reader doesn’t show much from the entry. So, I’m constantly clicking on each entry, reading it, going back to the unread list, picking a new entry to look at, etc.

All of this switching is pretty slow on a mobile device, even if I have a 300Kbps connection (latency is not good). Your experience kind of looks like this:

Google_reader_mobile01

Now, compare that to what you get in the Bloglines mobile reader. The full text in the feed is displayed. On my PDA, images usually get shrinked 50%, so the display doesn’t quote look this good:

Bloglines_mobile01

Reading posts via Bloglines mobile is simply much more efficient. If a feed is large and has lots of entries and images, I can begin reading the first few entries while the rest of the entries load (though sometimes my scrollbar freezes, blast!)

Lastly, Bloglines skweezes all of the links you see in the feeds. So, anything I visit while surfing on the mobile device is nicely formatted for my phone.

I’m wondering how long Bloglines can survive, particularly if Google comes out with yet another revision that simply addresses all of my needs. That scenario is likely and I’ll be watching.

For now, I remain a Bloglines user and the mobile version is to be thanked for this.

 

Continue reading "Bloglines vs. Google Reader" »

September 29, 2006

Even more perfect passwords

I am a heavy user of Steve Gibson's Perfect Passwords web page. You can generate self-proclaimed "Ultra High Secuirity" passwords. Some sites don't allow 63 or 64 character passwords, however, and I'm constantly partially selecting a piece to submit.

Oh, and it’s sometimes hard to detect that they didn’t support it. They either tell you or they blindly truncate your password on some unknown character, forcing you do slowly enter progressively smaller or larger portions of  the password before getting in. Arg.

The password page generally shows passwords that look like this:

Grc_password1

When I visit a new web site which requires a password, I usually go to this page and select the first 8–12 characters. I do this by hand, manually selecting the group with my mouse. I enter this into the site and record the password in a text file located on my TrueCrypt volume (the topic of another post, I suppose).

It would be great if Steve could modify the site to add some CSS padding between each 8–character block. The effect would look like this (I only modified  the last one):

Grc_password2

The markup is pretty brainless, use of a CSS class would be cleaner:

<span style="padding-right: 5px">q9z2bYXZ</span><span style="padding-right: 5px">p3be6QOt</span><span style="padding-right: 5px">zPrzQfwx</span><span style="padding-right: 5px">yLG4iegC</span><span style="padding-right: 5px">0xMBPEiI</span><span style="padding-right: 5px">xpn6Gk7L</span><span style="padding-right: 5px">VIKNz3lZ</span><span style="padding-right: 5px">kIQ4ctO</span>

The padding does not show up in your clipboard if you span blocks. The only downside is that double-clicking on a block won’t select it. That would be the ultimate. Does anyone know how to accomplish that? Have spaces which are invisible to the clipboard but will allow a user to double-click and select an 8–character block like a word? Oh, and you can’t use script, Steve Gibson hateses script, he does.

If I can come up with a complete solution, I’ll see about submitting this to Steve.

 

July 13, 2006

I love my AOL IM account again

I've had my AOL IM account for years and years and years. My ID is NickCody99. However, I've always hated the AOL IM client. Compared to the brilliant design of Yahoo! IM and the Google Talk client, the ad-filled AOL IM client was always severely lagging behind.

At one point, I tried using the Triton beta of AOL IM. It was definitely a UI improvement but the presence of ads was still too much in my face. I had the option to choose whether ads are displayed full-time in the buddy list or when I'm chatting in the chat window. Both options were lame as far as I'm concerned.

Enter my new MacBook and iChat. iChat is an awesome chat/audio/video client. It has the simplistic design similar to Google Talk. iChat works with their own iChat accounts, AOL IM accounts, Jabber servers, and locally with Bonjour (formerly Rendevouz but not after Reuters got pissed off at the use of their trademarked messaging middleware).

So, I'm now chatting with someone who's likely using the AOL IM or Trillian but I don't care that I'm doing it via my AOL IM account. I'm using a better client.

Slowly but surely, the Mac improves my life. Even if only in trivial ways,.

May 13, 2006

Hard Drive Failure!

One of my dual 300GB hard drives failed last night. The dual-drive configuration is set up so the primary drive contains everything important and the secondary drive is a backup.

To back up my files, I use a STOMP Backup MyPC. I don’t back up everything, just all of my critical files like my music library, photo library, and files I authored or created in Photoshop / Illustrator.

Good thing for me the backup drive failed. If the primary failed, my weekend would be more or less miserable as I’d have to re-install Windows before being able to restore the backup.

So, I want to come up with a new backup strategy that will overcome these limitations. The goal of this new strategy is to always have working copy of my primary drive for instant no-hassle restoration. This can be achieved with Norton Ghost, which I have.

However, Norton Ghost reboots into a modified version of DOS so it’s not something I can automate on a nightly or weekly basis.

The solution I’ve devised is a combination of nightly STOMP backups combined with monthly Ghost image-taking. Every month I’ll reboot my machine and “ghost” my primary drive. This creates an exact duplicate that serves as my “no-hassle” restoration. Then, each night my drive will be backed up by STOMP.

In the event of a primary drive failure, I simply remove the bad drive and replace it with the ghost version. Once Windows restarts, I restore the ghosted image (which will be up to a month old) with last night’s backup. Finally, I’ll order a new 300GB drive to serve as the new ghost backup.

Since my machine only supports two drives, I ordered an external SATA enclosure. The ghost drive will sit in this enclosure.

The total equipment charge of my order was $295 (2x300GB drives + enclosure) and I ordered from newegg.com. While this may seem a bit pricey, in the event of a failure and being faced with either losing all of my data and/or spending the weekend restoring my drive, I’d pay just about anything.

March 14, 2006

Testing w.bloggar

I'm testing a new blogging editor called w.bloggar. The skinny: don't bother. Read on if you're a masochist. BlogJet seems superior for two primary reasons related to the way I work. First, it has WYSIWYG editing. Second, it supports the automatic creation of thumbnail images. The interface for w.bloggar is far more complicated than that of BlogJet but I'm having a hard time figuring out what it can do that BlogJet can't despite that complexity. Oh, yeh, w.bloggar is free. You can donate, of course, but if you are going to go and spend money you might as well spend it on BlogJet. w.bloggar can post draft posts, which BlogJet seems to have a problem with. This is actually good since I'm still under the impression that BlogJet can't do that. I'll have to test that so you may see another small post after this one. w.bloggar seems to have been built with VB6 which is a crappy language, but it can still produce modern XP-style applications. BlogJet was built with Delphi, I think. It has a XP-style interface but there is one quirk which drives me insane! The menus to not have accelerators. I can't hit Alt + E to pull down the edit menu so I can select Paste Special. I use paste special a lot to remove formatting. The UI in BlogJet for inserting images is light-years ahead of w.bloggar. Take my word for it. The w.bloggar forums seem dead. On the other hand, BlogJet support is fantastic. Dmitry Chestnykh always gets back to you within 24 hours. I am finding myself wondering why I continue to write this review. Goodnight.

Test of Draft Posting

I don’t normally make draft posts, but I’m doing it because I always thought BlogJet couldn’t do it. I recently wasted an hour of my life testing w.bloggar (don’t waste your time) and when I finally saw the post, all of my newlines were lost. I can probably tweak the blog to fix that but why bother?

UPDATE: BlogJet posts as draft just fine.

February 25, 2006

Raw

Over my vacation to the Dominican Republic, I had some time to do some programming. You might be wondering why in the world I would be programming on my vacation. I have a few answers.

First, I like programming in serene environments. The sound of the beach, the lapping waves and the wind against palm trees is very soothing. I enjoy this almost as much as sitting by the pool or beach drinking a good beer. Second, my son was sick and he basically layed in bed all day like a log. I had to watch him part of the day while the rest of the family enjoyed the sun. Third, the raw files my camera was generating were eating up like 20MB each. Many of my shots were crap and I wanted the raw files gone.

What’s a raw file? A raw file is a proprietary file format stored by most medium to high-end cameras. A raw file stores a lot more color and pixel information than a regular jpg file. First, it’s uncompressed so when you zoom into little details you won’t find jpg compression artifacts. Second, it stores more colors. Typically 12–bits of color per channel. That’s 4096 shades of gray instead of 256. This can make a big difference in certain circumstances, especially when you are changing your image brightness, contrast, or doing color correction. Without this extra color information, an innocent image brightening can wipe out a lot of detail in that very white sand.

I use Google’s Picasa software to manage my photos.  When my camera records raw, I also told it to store a 3 mega-pixel jpg file. Picasa easily imports these and ignores the raw files. I have to manually copy the raw files onto my hard drive.

Picasa is awesome software and I use it to crop photos, delete bad ones, and basically review everything. However, any time I delete a jpg-based photo in Picasa, the raw file remains.

Fortunately the raw file has the same file name as the associated jpg file. It was easy to write a program that will find all *.sr2 (my raw extension) files that have no associated *.jpg file in a given directory tree. Vioa, enter Raw Version 0. Download Raw Version 0. I do have to come up with a better name.

The program will only work under Windows XP and you’ll need to download and install the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86).

Raw_v0

Now I can manage my photos in Picasa and clean up the crappy raw files consuming gigabytes of space on my hard drive.

February 15, 2006

Fully Google-ized

I created a new category called workflow where I’ll tag my entries having to do with my personal workflow. This includes software I use, how I use it, etc.

I re-tagged my original post on how I switched to the Google Desktop Search at home. well, now I’ve switched at work. What lured me?

  • Faster searches – MSN Search would frequently hang and report that it wasn’t running when I issued a search. It would also hang every time I rebooted, forcing me to shut it down.
  • Integration with all of my machines. I can now search my archive mail on my laptop, even though the 5 years of Outlook archive files resides on my desktop.
  • Encryption of your indexed data. This slows down things, but I don’t think I’ll notice it.

When Vista rolls out, my use of Firefox and Google Desktop Search may be threatened. Until then…

February 12, 2006

Switched to Google Desktop Search

Google_desktop… at home anyway. For some reason, I was getting increasingly unhappy with the performance of MSN Desktop Search at home. I was always torn between the merits of the Google and Microsoft offerings. The feature of MSN Desktop Search which pushed me over the edge was their neat “macro” feature. I could define little keywords and map them to arbitrary web links. Thus, a definition like the one below would substitute whatever I type in place of the $w. Consider this macro definition:

@wiki,http://www.primordia.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/$w

If I then typed:

wiki FrontPage

My browser would launch and I’d go here:

http://www.primordia.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/FrontPage

First, I find myself not using that feature like I used to. Second, the only other feature which inspired me to choose MSN Desktop search was the “richness” of the results window. Since the results window was basically Windows Explorer and Microsoft wrote a custom extension to implement such features as “Open Containing Folder” and “Thumbnail View”.

Despite the fact that the Google Desktop Search uses a browser, in my case Firefox, it manages to pull off some of these platform-dependent features you wouldn’t expect a browser to handle. The implementation is simple, I believe. The browser talks to a local web server that’s embedded into the Google Desktop Search engine. For specific “open folder” requests, the platform-specific web server goes and opens t he window. Firefox doesn’t need that capability.

I am further inspired to use the Google offering because I find myself using Google Talk and my Gmail account more and more. The ever-growing feature list of the Google sidebar are starting to reel me in.

January 24, 2006

Bloglines... what's up?

Blogo225x50A few Bloglines quips. 

First, as most Bloglines users can probably attest, they haven’t substantially changed their service in a long, long time. This is no news to anyone. In their defense, the one feature I noticed that they added a little while back was their excellent well-designed mobile version.

Second, since they marke a feed as fully read when you click on it, I find myself letting feeds that have accumulated a lot of post age even more since I’m afraid I won’t have the time to fully go through each post. I know I can mark the entire feed as “unread” or pick and choose posts that I’d like to keep. However, I wish I could configure bloglines to present a single “page” of posts and I can nibble away at a backlog at my own pace without a lot of “Keep as New” clicking.

 

January 18, 2006

iCal, RSS, Web 2.0

Bear with me…

 

Tim Bray inspired this post with his PHP Calendar Fun post…

 

Mozilla Sunbird can subscribe to iCal files on the web. In fact, you can subscribe to multiple iCal files and Sunbird will merge them. If I’m not mistaken, the Apple iCalendar application uses this format and I imagine invented it. Yep.

 

Say I want to share my calendar with my wife. I do this now with WebDAV on my personal web server (primordia.com). I’d rather use a Web 2.0 “calendar service”, call it cal.endar.us. cal.endar.us which lets me host my calendar which I can share and grant write access to permissioned people. Subscribers would see a complete iCal file on the web but it would be dynamically generated with each request based on the latest event information on the site.

 

One step further… cal.endar.us could support a Web UI to enter events. Subscribers to the iCal files will automatically get updates as they refresh their calendars. This way I or others can add events to my calendar while traveling or otherwise away from a client with something like Sunbird installed. Though, check out Portable Sunbird.

 

One step further… calendar events and entries get taggified. These tags can be used to create virtual iCal subscriptions. I want to subscribe to an iCal composed of “concert” and “Brooklyn”. You can share tags with friends and look at what the community at large is tagging. [Insert the rest of the advantages of social bookmarking here]

 

One step further… RSS feeds of bands or other social groups can have their normal blog feeds parsed for dates. The cal.endar.us can subscribe to these feeds and compose tagged entries. Some junk will likely get in until a standard for calendar/event extension to RSS or Atom is developed. Maybe the capability is already there.

 

So let’s talk about syndicated calendar events. RSScal? AtomCal? CalAtom? Pop syndicated event functionality into Sunbird or iCalendar and events can stream in. Multiple streams can be subscribed to just like multiple iCal files can be subscribed.

 

A little digging brought me to Technorati hCalendar events (beta). This seems exactly like what I’m describing here, better even. hCalendar seems pretty cool:

This specification introduces the hCalendar format, which is a 1:1 representation of the aforementioned iCalendar standard, in semantic XHTML. Bloggers can both embed hCalendar events directly in their web pages, and style them with CSS to make them appear as desired. In addition, hCalendar enables applications to retrieve information about such events directly from web pages without having to reference a separate file.

Still, I wonder if there is opportunity beyond what technorati is currently offering. It still seems to require a tech-savvy user to make effective use of the service. Not something I’d direct my mom to.

 

January 15, 2006

wickr - a good widget

Wickr

I’m finding myself using the wickr widget for the Yahoo Widget Engine more and more. In fact, it’s a staple on my desktop these days.

I found the widget via the most excellent Windows RSS Feed (there’s a Mac feed as well).

The widget works by presenting you with the most recent public images on flickr.

You can give the widget permission to access your photostream by loggin in. Once you do that, you can view your photostream and favorites by clicking on your image.

You can type in one or more search tags and wickr will present the first page of thumbnails. You can view subsequent pages using the little funky scrollbar control you see above the search box.

Search results can be organized by most recent or most interesting. I believe flickr classifies most interesting as those photos with either the most comments or the most people who mark a photo a favorite.

In any case, you can click on any of the thumbnails to view a larger preview window.

Wickr2

This preview window has a bunch of tools that you can play with. From left to right:

  • See the profile of the flickr user when you hover over their profile image
  • See the title of the photo
  • View the description
  • See the tags the photo is classified with
  • See notes
  • Addit to your favorite photos
  • See different sizes
  • Save it to disk
  • Close the preview window

wickr comes highly recommended.

January 26, 2005

More on Picasa

After using Picasa 2 for a few more days, I feel that I am well equipped to make some suggestions on how it can be improved. On the positive side, I have discovered a few new features and I should probably talk about those as well.

Let’s first talk about the improvements.

  • The program seems to crash when I play a video and I hit the back button on my mouse or the “Back to Library” button. The problem doesn’t seem to happen if I pause the video first. It’s always good to have a workaround.
  • I wish Picasa would support more image types. I’m pretty sure this will happen naturally from version to version. I should probably engage Google and see if I can make some kind of product suggestion. In particular, I wish they supported Adobe Illustrator files and layed Photoshop files.
  • Assigning labels is way too onerous. The drag and drop is nice, but it should be even faster. I think most people will typically assign labels based on family member names like “Marco”, “Antonio” and “Giovanni”. It would be great if I could assign hot keys like Alt+1 to a label, like “Giovanni”.

Now for the new features. These features were there all along, I simply didn’t invoke them when I wrote my last review.

  • The image backup feature is cool. I’m testing it now with some of my DVD-RW media. It can easily span DVD’s and this is handy since my image collection is about 8.4GB.
  • Background jobs are handled with a cool status window that sits on top of your desktop (and all windows for that matter). It looks like this:

Backup

  • Labels. I’m starting to use them but before I got sucked into an all-night job of labeling thousands of photos, I stopped myself. I do wish I could filter on “unlabeled” photos so I can make a few passes efficiently. I think Adobe Album shows a small label icon on top of images that have labels. In Picasa, there is nothing.

More to come as I learn more…

Now playing: Coverville - Coverville-050120

January 23, 2005

Picasa 2

I am shocked and amazed.

I didn’t expect much from Picasa 2 from Google when I checked it out last night. I already tried their previous version and wasn’t that impressed. The new version has

You can take Picasa’s own tour if you like, but I thought I’d give you the Nick version.

Setup and Search

Picasa’s setup program weighs in at a mere 3MB and installs in a flash. It immediately asked me if I wanted to search my entire computer or just “My Pictures”, “Desktop”, and “Shared Documents” (I’m not so sure on that last one). What I really wanted it to do was allow me to pick a folder since I store all of my digital images in D:\Photo Library. I don’t think this will be a problem for most people, just for me. As luck would have it, though, you can tweak the search process with the Folder Manager. This screenshot is self-explanatory.

Picasa_folder_manager

You’ll probably want to tweak this since some very strange image files get sucked into your library if you don’t. For instance, Dell installed a directory called C:\Dell on my system and it has some cooky bitmap files dated 1995 that pollute my timeline (more on that later).

The Program at 20,000 feet

The library manager itself has some key features which make the program a dream to work with. First, scrolling is fine tuned and smooth. They use a dampening function to slow down the scroll gently when you stop moving your mouse wheel. Second, when you double-click on an image or invoke any secondary detail screen (such as a slideshow), your mouse’s “back” button (or t he backspace) will bring you back to the library browser. Third, all such screen transitions crossfade so the program has a silky feel to it.

Picasa_library_manager

There’s lots to do on the main screen.

First, you can see a list of folders or “albums” on the left. What I like about Picasa is that it uses my regular directory structure to construct albums, so I can work in Windows Explorer or Picasa and I’ll never get out of sync.

If you noticed in the Folder Manager, there are three attributes that you can assign to a directory. You can ignore it, scan it once, or monitor it.

Second, notice the picture tray. There are a few ways you can get images into the tray but once they’re in there, you can print, e-mail, create a collage, order prints online, post to your blogger blog, and more. The picture tray is basically a way to select disparate photos, simulate an ad-hoc clipboard, or whatever.

Importing Pictures

I used to always access my photos via the removable drive letter and manually move them to my desktop and later my Photo Album directory. Not any more. I’ve been converted!

I’ve tried a few other photo organizing programs before. Most notably Snapfish’s and Adobe Album (or whatever it’s called). These programs never nailed it. I’m not sure what it is and since Picasa is so good, I won’t spend the energy to re-evaluate those solutions. All I can say is that I’m happy with how the import process works. Simple folders are the mechanism used and this works perfectly into my workflow.

I do like to organize my photos into a top-level directory structure by year. By default, Picasa creates a folder directly under the album root (wghich is settable).

Folder

However, I can quickly open an album in Windows explorer and then move the new folder into my year folder in seconds. Not bad.

Folder2

Image Enhancements

You can enhance images one at a time or in batch. The results are pretty good, but I think I’ll stick to Photoshop for any heavy lifting. Here is some of the UI for fixing images:

Fix1

and

Fix2

and finally,

Fix3

Timeline

One of the most useful features that most of these programs have is a timeline view. Somewhat annoyingly, Picasa switches to a low-resolution video mode when rendering the timeline and I couldn’t grab a screenshot without resorting to tricky methods. So, I didn’t bother.

Searching

Searching is quick. I noticed that Photoshop Album is beavily tag-oriented. This is a lot of work and something  that I don’t know if I’ll ever take advantage of. I think Picasa calls these “labels” but they are certainly not the forefront of the UI design. Anyway, I name my directories pretty well and  this has so far proven to be good enough for me right now. Sure, it would be nice to type in “Giovanni” and see all of the pictures of my son, but for now I scan things by hand to find just the right image for a slideshow or DVD.

Other neat things

You can do a few other neat things with Picasa. You can create a screensaver, generate movie files (including full res avi movies). The movies files generate movies in kind of a “Photo Story Lite” fashion.  There is a strange zooming effect thatkind of zigs from one direction to another during the zoom. Strange, but not a bad effect. There is no customization so I’m not sure how m uch I can use that. Thirdly, you can create photo grids and collages. Here is a collage I made in seconds from a bunch of pictures in my picture tray.

Picasabackground

You can save this to a file or set it as your background.

Conclusion

My dinner party is nigh so I can’t finish this like I was hoping to. So far so good. If I get disappointed with Picasa at any point, I’ll be sure to note it here. for now, I’m liking it alot.

January 18, 2005

Virtual PC and Trialware

Thought of the day: It seems to me that Virtual PC could be used to circumvent Trialware. Every time your trial expires, you trash the virtual machine and install again.

Now playing: Jon Gordon - Future Tense

November 11, 2004

Konfabulator

A colleague sent me a link to Konfabulator! The tagline reads, "whatever you want it to be" and this is certainly true. Konfabulator was out for Mac OS X for some time, I'm guessing 2 years based on the history found on the site. It's been available for Windows more recently, though I can't figure out when it was released.

What is Konfabulator?

Konfabulator is a system that allows you to create rich UI widgets that can appear like and do just about anything. You define the look and structure of the widget in XML and you program it via JavaScript. This is not unlike what Microsoft is doing with XAML, the XML markup Microsoft is developing for their forthcoming Longhorn OS release. In addition, it's not unlike the XML User Interface Language XUL developed by the The Mozilla Organization and which serves as the heart of the Firefox web browser

I'm not sure how XUL works, in terms of how you link between the XUL markup and your traditional sources (like C/C++ and Java). I do know a little bit about how XAML works, though I must warn you that I've never actually written a XAML application.

Microsoft XAML uses XML markup to define the UI structure of a program. More than that, you can define parts of your classes in XAML and combine them with classes written in C#, C++/CLI or whatever. Using the partial class features of the .NET 2.0 framework, you can spread a single class definition over multiple files, over multiple languages, including XAML.

What makes XAML powerful is that it's XML. XML is easily parsed and generated and you can use illustration tools like Adobe Illustrator to generate XAML markup and then decorate it with code and otherwise build our application around this model.

Konfabulator seems a bit different, but similar in spirit. Using Konfabulator, you define your widget in XML and you provide JavaScript code right in  the XML markup. You can point to external JavaScript files since JavaScript might be easier to edit in a dedicated JavaScript editor.

Visuals

Konfabulator nailed some nice antialiased non-rectangular window code. If you specify the graphic for your widget as a PNG file with alpha channel, the edges of your application blend smoothly with your Windows desktop. Here is a sample widget. My desktop background is that brownish color you see.

This aint no Weatherbug!

It's clear that the text is antialiased as well but I'm not sure how you draw graphics but it seems like the graphics rendered with some of the widgets are antialiased and smooth as well. I'm also not sure if the graphic API you use allows you to draw vector-based graphics, though there is a lot of evidence t hat this capability is there. Here are a pair of cool world clocks. You have to see these in action as t he second hand bounces as it snaps from second to second... just like a real clock.

Tea time in London

Widgets, widgets, widgets

There are a lot of widgets on the Konfabulator gallery page. They have the world clock pictured above, an iTunes remote, RSS monitors (I'll shy away from saying they are full aggregators, though they could be), traffic monitors with real-time images, etc.

There are also a lot of application-specific and vertical market widgets like the smsOptimus Sender which sends sms messages to a particular type of cell phone or the adslTelepac counter which shows t he upload/download traffic information obtained in the ADSL Telepac management site (whatever that is! I copied that description).

It's possible that geeky employees could write cool little applications that can run on people's desktops. Perhaps a daily volume monitor with sound effects or a nightly build monitor that melts when the nightly test run posts miserable results.

The possibilities are, of course, limitless.

Write your own widgets

To create your own widgets it looks like you need to purchase Konfabulator. The list price of $24.95 is pretty low and certainly a bargain if you consider the cool factor of the application.

Check it out. I'm going to keep tabs on the gallery. Their forum section supports RSS so this should be easy.

 

November 7, 2004

Virtual PC 2004

I'm playing around with Microsoft's Virtual PC 2004 tonight. You can download a 45-day Free Trial Edition and play around with it yourself.

I was kind of amazed at how well it works, but before I go into that let me explain what it is. VPC is an emulator for an entire computer. If you create a brand new VPC and you "start" it, you get a boot screen complete with hard disk detection, memory counting, etc. Of course, you can set all of these parameters and any drives you create are merely files on your hard drive.

Having a virtual computer like this has a few obvious benefits and a few more subtle ones. These are:

  • You can install multiple OS's on your machine and the management of them is far easier to understand and less risky than granting the Windows bootloader or GRUB the privilege of managing real OS installations on your real drive.
  • You can clone an OS install and evolve it separately from the original. This allows you to create a clean system and save that in case you want to go back to it.
  • You can work with an OS and when you're done, you can discard any changes you may have made to it. This allows, for instance, installation writers to test installation script against a clean system again and again.

The VPC you create is a real machine for all intents and purposes and this means that you need to physically install the hosted OS into the VPC. This means you have to "activate" Windows XP, for instance. The VPC 2004 license explicitly states that you need to purchase OS licenses appropriately.

Of course, once you "activate" a copy of Windows XP you can clone the installation as many times as your disk space will allow and no further activations will be necessary. I'm not sure how OS licensing applies at that point so tread carefully.

The performance of a VPC is better than I would have expected. I'd say a VPC runs at 50% to 75% of a real machine. For web browsing, e-mail reading, rss aggregation, general code editing, even light compiling the VPC speed is completely normal. Installations tend to drag on a bit and anything that is very disk intensive suffers more than tasks that are memory-based.

In the screenshot below, you can see that I'm installing Mandrake Linux 10.1.

Installation of OS's is supported by the ability to "claim" your real CD or DVD drive for use in the VM. It's basically mounted and used by the VPC. You can also mount an ISO image if you have one on your real disk. For the Mandrake installation above I had to pull down the CD menu and mount three separate ISO images as the installation required them.

The default VPC creates a virtual 16GB hard drive, creates a PC that reports 128MB of memory, and emulates a network connection, video, mouse, keyboard, COM ports, etc. The recommended memory allocation is only 128MB and I'm sure this is not too important a setting as your host OS' virtual memory system probably manages things better than you could. I should experiment with higher settings, but I feel this will only be necessary... when it's necessary and the reason is clear.

On your real drive, the VPC is a small file with a vmc file extension. The virtual hard drive file is the big one but is only as big as what you put into it. For instance, although the drive is 16GB, the on-disk utilization is only 1GB for a fresh XP install.

Once booted, a VPC can be pinged, connected to over TCP, shut down, suspended, and can do just about anything else you can think of.

The VPC isn't perfect. I failed to install Suse due to a hard disk error. I also failed to install Fedora Core 2 because I got a strange error that read as follows: "An internal virtual machine error (13) has occurred". Google says that others have experienced this error so I just moved onto Mandrake which was known to work well with VPC 2004. I'm not a real Linux user, so I had no allegiance to a particular distribution.

All in all, VPC seems like a good bargain at $120 list and a great way to geek out with alternative OS's.